During those days when the war in Western Europe had not yet got under way, so that it was called ‘the phoney war’, the drôle de guerre or the twilight war, an English journalist, with Labour sympathies, visited a number of French factories. He subsequently called on the minister responsible for industrial production, and posed the question of whether or not French workers were being obliged to work unjustifiably long hours. The minister replied: ‘If only there were a few more British soldiers in France, we could send more of our men back to the factories and the work load could be reduced.’

Letters

Douglas Johnson’s interesting and suggestive judgment (LRB, 25 April) that Admiral Darlan was not a simple Anglophobe is supported by Darlan’s readiness to act with, indeed even to entertain, Admiral A. B. Cunningham, Eisenhower’s Naval deputy in Algiers. Cunningham, it will be remembered, had refused to open fire on the French squadron in Alexandria in 1940 and had not concealed his whole-hearted opposition to the policy that had been forced on an equally reluctant Admiral Somerville at Mers el Kebir. The whole question is discussed in my book Fisher and Cunningham, published last month. As to Darlan’s assassination, I wonder if a better or clearer account of this affair can be found than that given by Jean Lacouture in the first volume of his life of De Gaulle, now available in Patrick O’Brian’s admirable translation.